Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate Dr Gillespie, the member for Lyne, for a lifetime of service to medicine and patients in his local community. He is very keen to see additional health services delivered into the electorate of Lyne, but, of course, it is made more difficult because Labor wasted billions of dollars. They set up what they claimed at the time to be the signature health policy of the Rudd-Gillard years—the so-called GP superclinics. That saw $650 million of borrowed money going into a program, including this one at Port Macquarie, but the problem is that not many patients have been seen.

I thought we were running out of examples of the success of the GP superclinic, but this one at Port Macquarie is pretty special. It is pretty special because the taxpayers of Australia have paid $5.6 million to this particular superclinic in Port Macquarie that was promised in 2010, but not a single patient has been seen at this clinic. So people rightly had an expectation that, when the Labor Party promised that a clinic would be set up, doctors would actually be employed and that patients would be seen.

I do not think it gets much more basic than that.

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